A better way to be a couch potato

By Tim Cottrell
Sports Writer/Designer
Published: May 23, 2008

This is something I wanted to write a column about during the preseason last year, but never could figure out how to make it coherent enough to fit inside a newspaper.

That’s why they make blogs.

I alluded to the fact in yesterday’s column that I’m not a fan of college football’s TV presentation, and let me try to illustrate that.

It’s true that more games are available for viewing than ever before, but unless you have the money for expanded satellite or cable packages or the Pay-per-view package, it’s difficult for the average person to get a chance to form an opinion on everyone.

To wit, two of the top conferences in the country — the Pac-10 and Big 12 — are virtually inaccessible to anyone east of the Mississippi due to ABC’s virtual monopoly on the major conferences.

If all you want to watch is the SEC, you’re in fine shape with their contracts with CBS, ESPN and Raycom, but in an era when if you’re in the national title hunt you have to pay attention to everyone, the current system makes it difficult to do so.

ABC has its regional games every Saturday at 2:30, usually featuring the ACC, Big East, Big 12 and maybe the Big 10 if one of them dares kick off after noon. So if you’re sitting at your house in Opelika, you’re most likely getting the ACC game in that time slot.

So what if the Big 12 game is huge? And the ACC game is trash (as many were last year)? Unless you have Gameplan or go to a sports bar, you can’t watch it.

And the Pac-10 is an even bigger problem. With their time zone issue, most of their games kick off around 5:30 our time to a West Coast-only audience. ABC’s prime-time package over the last couple years has addressed this to a degree, but quite often after the first few weeks of the season you’re just watching USC beat up on one of the weak sisters of their conference, or some random Big 12 game that doesn’t mean much.

A perfect example of this is Oct. 6 of last year. While SEC fans had little to complain about with a CBS doubleheader of Tennessee-Georgia and LSU-Florida, there was another little game that goes by the name of the Red River Shootout happening in Dallas.

Could viewers here on the East Coast watch it if they so chose? Nope.

While the vast majority of the country west of Montgomery or so got Oklahoma-Texas, parts of the Southeast (the Opelika-Auburn area included) were stuck with Florida State-N.C. State, and the northeast got a Penn State-Iowa stinker.

And things like that happen all the time.

Despite all its problems, this is one area I feel the NCAA should address (when I brought this up to my dad, the biggest NCAA hater this side of Mark “No NCAA” Townsend he nearly disowned me).

For one, if FOX is going to show college football’s biggest games of the season, including the national championship game, it should at least show some games during the regular season to allow its broadcast, studio and production crews to have some idea what’s going on (and if you didn’t notice over the last two years that it was the opposite at times you weren’t paying attention).

NBC can’t possibly be making as much money as before with Notre Dame, so what would stop them from picking up something?

So here’s my plan:

CBS can keep its exclusive SEC deal, but the time has come for ABC to give up a couple of conferences, and I think this could work perfectly.

Let FOX take the Big 12 and Big East (they could use regional doubleheaders and work games around their fall baseball and playoff schedule), and let NBC take the Pac-10 (to run in the 6 p.m. slot after their Notre Dame games, and in doubleheaders when Notre Dame isn’t at home).

That leaves ABC with the Big 10 (whom you’d have to pry out of their cold, dead hands) and the ACC, which is plenty good for ratings purposes.

So if you do that, college football fans will have four games to choose from every Saturday in the regular 2:30 p.m. timeslot when deciding what games to watch, and a much better chance to be informed about every team as the BCS race heats up over the course of the season. I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.